Report Ecommerce in Italy 2022

New Italian customers – more than 3 and a half million – who have started to access the internet in the last two years thanks to the lockdowns, have begun to show their effects on turnover which has grown by 33% in just one year, reaching over 64 billion euros in 2021. The main problem is still that in Italy there is still not enough investment in e-commerce.
However, the digital channel makes up 17% of retail sales. This is why, on the one hand, thousands of Italian stores in 2021 have closed down and, on the other, foreign operators, who are expanding into the Italian market, are taking advantage of this new channel.
European countries have started to protect the internal market with privacy violation fines and by taking dominant positions against the big international giants. At the same time, they have simplified trade on the European continent by greatly simplifying VAT management with the One-Stop-Shop.
Thanks also to these simplifications, today more than half of Italian e-commerce operators sell in foreign markets with a 32% turnover, obtained mainly from French, Spanish, German and English customers.
From a business model point of view, the considerable increase in turnover is pushing the companies with better infrastructures to be chosen for the service and on the other side, there are companies with product control who want to have direct contact with the customer. This is why marketplaces consolidate at the top of the Top 100 Italian e-commerce rankings, while manufacturers are starting to climb the rankings by actually pushing retailers to evolve their business model. For example, Decathlon, becoming a marketplace to be considered the entry point for those looking for sports equipment.
Whoever becomes an entry point on the internet for the research of products to buy has also an important second advantage: optimising advertisement investments. The high demand by customers during lockdown has significantly simplified marketing activity. However, at the end of lockdown, foreign operators have entered the field and again increased advertisement competition and therefore the complexity of marketing activities. In 2021, operators again had to find new ways to attract customers. One of these levers that, luckily, is proving to be important is the environmental sustainability of retail. Italy, more than other countries, has
customers with a strong awareness of this issue.
2022 will probably be a year of strong acceleration of e-commerce in some areas such as Tourism that, thanks to a probable reopening of many businesses, will be able to take advantage of millions of new customers online.